Virus or Failing Hard Drive?

Ph0enix33Oct 13, 2012, 4:34 AM

Hi everyone,

One of my home computers recently came down with a redirect virus. I ran Malwarebytes which found 2 threats and removed them. This eliminated a great deal of the redirects that I was getting, but I still experienced some on occasion. I let this go, as it was not causing me too much trouble (dumb idea, I know) but recently ran into another problem. My computer has started shutting itself down (not cutting off as if having lost power, but actually closing applications itself and shutting down). This startled me so I ran MBAM again but it did not detect anything. This shut down incident happened again tonight, but this time gave me the winload.exe error upon restarting. I tried inserting my disc to recover the file, but it seems to do nothing. The hard drive windows is loaded on is also mysteriously missing from the drive window when running recovery from my Vista disc. The system is able to find my secondary storage hard drive, but I cannot seem to get it to locate my primary drive with the windows installation. I have checked all SATA/Power cables to be sure nothing came loose, and have verified that I am able to see my primary hard drive in BIOS, but nothing past that. At this point, it is merely booting to a blank screen with a flashing cursor, rather than giving me the winload.exe error (this started after attempting to load the drivers for my hard disk, as is suggested by the prompt if your Windows installation is not shown in the recovery window). My first instinct was that the hard drive may be dead, but the fact that I can see it in BIOS, AND it happened just as my computer decided to shut down on its own, presumably from whatever I was infected with, has me believing it is a little too much of a coincidence. Is there anything I can do at this point to either restore the functionality of the drive, or at least have my computer recognize it long enough to recover data from it?

After testing, it seems that this is definitely a malware problem. I connected the hard drive to another computer, but it still did not start Windows. I then switched it to being the secondary hard drive, and booted from a drive with Windows installed. This let me access the hard drive that has been booting to the black screen, and see all of the data. Since I am able to access the drive this way, I can back up the important files and just wipe my old drive if necessary, but I would like to be able to simply solve the problem/remove whatever virus is causing this in the first place if possible.